Digital video capabilities are provided in a wide range of devices, including digital televisions, digital direct broadcast systems, wireless broadcast systems, personal digital assistants (PDAs), laptop or desktop computers, digital cameras, digital recording devices, video gaming devices, video game consoles, cellular or satellite radio telephones, and the like. Digital video devices implement video compression techniques, such as those described in various standards including MPEG-2, MPEG-4, or ITU-T H.264/MPEG-4, Part 10, Advanced Video Coding (AVC). Video compression techniques may perform spatial prediction and temporal prediction to reduce redundancy, and communicate digital video more efficiently.
Region-of-interest (ROI) processing may involve recording or coding one or more selected regions of a video frame differently than other regions. As an example, an ROI may be preferentially encoded with higher quality than other, non-ROI regions. With preferential encoding of the ROI, a user may be able to view the ROI more clearly than non-ROI regions. As another example, zooming panning may be performed at the time of video recording to enhance the visibility or quality of an ROI within a recorded video scene. In each case, the ROI is established at the video recording or encoding stage, and then viewed upon decoding and displaying a given video frame.